Dive Brief:
- Texas A&M University - San Antonio has served juniors, seniors and graduate students for more than a decade, but opened its doors to freshmen and sophomores for the first time in the fall of last year, according to the Association of American Colleges and Universities.
- The college based its new programs on incorporating three “high-impact practices,” which are particularly demanding, take students outside of the classroom and are typically associated with positive outcomes. The college is building high-impact practice writing-intensive, research, and service-and-experiential learning courses.
- The school is also working to develop new faculty members. The institution offered several weeks of development that focused on how to incorporate experiential learning, course design and student services and also introduced educators to terminology like high-impact practices.
Dive Insight:
The service aspect of high-impact practices as employed by Texas A&M-SA could be revelatory for college students. Excursions outside of the classroom will encourage students to broaden their horizons, and will also offer practical experience and possible ideas for future job pursuits, like a field trip to a tech industry might. The Center for Community Engaged Learning stresses that service learning could also be a way for students to explore or codify “values and beliefs” while also giving them an opportunity to act on them. If colleges are meant to be settings to develop yourself as you develop your education, service learning could be extremely beneficial.
The challenge for this university and others will be to make service learning an integrated and commonplace part of each student’s curriculum, in the same way that an emphasis on writing and research are assumed as givens on the path to a degree. This 2009 report from the ACCU pointed the way forward on many of the issues and opportunities schools have now in regards to high-impact practices.
The report stressed that there must be buy-in from faculty on service learning, that it should not be considered a mandated practice interfering with a traditional education. The report also asserted that it must be made clear to students how service learning opportunities complement and burnish the education they receive in the classroom. These issues continue to be pertinent for educators incorporating this approach today as they were several years ago.